Our member city of Stuttgart, Germany, is developing a tailor-made contracting support service for private house owners.

Despite municipal energy subsidies and technical assistance offered by the local energy info centre, the annual energy refurbishment rate of the residential sector in Stuttgart stagnates between 1 % and 2 %. The objective of the city is to raise this rate up to 3 % by 2020 and to go, on a voluntary basis, beyond the European Energy Efficiency Directive objectives and scope.

This is why the city has decided to offer an all-round care-free package for the owners who decide to carry out energy renovation of their homes.

In general, the contracting service includes one or all parts of the following services: planning, building and construction, operation and operational optimization, financing, guarantee and risk assumption. Depending on the chosen composition, the service results into different business models.

In Stuttgart, the draft business model is based on the traditional energy performance contracting including the refurbishment of building envelope. Both are offered with an energy-saving guarantee and can be extended to energy supply. The service shall be paid by the contractors or home owners. In all cases the house owners can finance part of the services.

All legal questions were analysed by lawyers and integrated into a model contract. This model contract can be used to create individual contracts for final beneficiaries of the scheme.The final business model will be agreed with possible providers. At this stage, further discussions need to be carried out.

The public contracting support service is being implemented by a strong core team: the municipality, the independent municipal energy advice centre and the municipal energy service company (ESCO) - Stadtwerke Stuttgart - which are all intensively engaged with innovative services for private households.

The city of Stuttgart is implementing these actions in the framework of the EU-funded INFINITE Solutions project, developed and led by Energy Cities.